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Monday, 2 January 2017

Saal Digital Photo Book ... A Review

I'm one of those people who take photographs all the time. Of everything and anything, and mostly of other people who shout: 'Oh, mum. Don't.' at me shortly after. I'm also one of those people who never, ever gets their photos printed out, thousands languish on my hard drive unseen for years

Until, that is, Saal Digital came to the rescue with the opportunity to create one of their photo books. Saal Digital is a German company specialising in printing services and they offer a range of photo books in a number of sizes and formats: Landscape or portrait, with soft covers, hardcovers, or luxurious leather bindings.

There's a choice of glossy or matt pages, lots of colour options for both the cover and pages, you can add your own text, and there's loads of page templates to help you design your photo book. You can even freestyle it your own way using the software's page grids and resizing tools. Either way you can truly individualise each page cherry picking from the templates or not, depending on how you choose each double page spread to look.

The front cover of my Saal Design photo book

I chose to create a landscape A4 size photo book of favourite photographs from holidays and days out over the past couple of years. Downloading and installing Saal Digital's software is quick and easy and you can start your design, save it and reopen it again (as well as download it as a PDF) so you don't have to design your book in one session. The software also loads all of the photos on your hard drive to the software so there's no uploading one image after another, you just search straight from the software.

The only time-consuming element of the whole process is deciding which photographs to choose, although you can add pages to your photo book as you design if you simply can't decide.

When you've finished your design, the time between uploading it to Saal Digital and it arriving is astonishing. My finished photo book dropped on to the doormat just a couple of days later.

And the finished product was absolute stunning, I'd opted for a gloss finish for the cover and pages and a faint lilac background because, well, why not but as it turned out, it made my photos pop on the page so, hurrah well done me.

Photo quality was excellent whether taken by the big camera, the point and shoot, or the phone. The colour translation of the photos from screen to print was true while the lay flat binding (meaning the book lays flat when opened at every page) means you never lose sight of the edge or the middle of a photo to the terror of an inner margin.

Back cover and the only shots of me in the entire photo book. Oh....

I was hugely impressed with the overall quality of my photo book, even more impressed that there are no Saal Digital logos or brand names on the finished article so if you give it as a gift (Saal Digital will even gift box it for you), it does look like a personalised gift and not an advertisement,

But mostly I fell just a little bit in love with my own photos all over again. So sorry kids, I'll be pointing cameras in your face for a little while yet,

Not sorry.

Disclosure: I was gifted a Saal Design Photo Book to the value of £40 for review. All thoughts and opinions are my own.